[ale] Hardware question: BIOS not seeing my 500GB SATA for Kubuntu install

[Tim Watts]

Hi,

On Saturday 14 February 2009 3:09 am, James Sumners wrote:
> Best Buy sells SCSI drives? You must have a special Best Buy near you,
> because they don't even list SCSI hard drives as being available on
> their website.

The SCSI boot up messages may have been incidental to the situation. The 
systems (BIOS & Linux) seem to treat SATAs kind of like SCSIs 
(e.g. /dev/sda). I'm speaking from a vantage of almost total ignorance on 
this point so don't even bother responding to this statement.

>
> Since you mentioned the presence of jumpers, I'm going to assume you
> are talking about EIDE hard drives. If that is the case, then you will

You could assume that. But you'd be wrong. :-) The drive is SATA. The jumpers 
en/disable performance & managability features.

Thanks anyway.

> be MUCH better off by setting the jumpers appropriately. Cable select
> just doesn't work 9 times out of 10. Set a master and a slave via
> jumper settings. I bet that solves your problem.
>

By way of further information, the drive seems to whir with a very slight 
vibration so it IS getting power.

> On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 1:53 AM, Tim Watts <timtw at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > Hi Folks,
> >
> > I'm trying to replace a fried 120GB drive with a 500GB drive on a system
> > I bought from Monarch circa 2004. However, the BIOS screen doesn't see
> > the drive at all (and, of course, the Kubuntu installer doesn't either).
> >
> > By "doesn't see it" I mean that as the system boots and scans for SCSI
> > devices, I hit the Tab key to enter the RAID User Screen and when it
> > displays, both channels show "No Drive". I have it connected same way the
> > 120GB drive was (power & data cables); but no jumpers as none of them
> > seem appropriate for my needs according to the manual.
> >
> > Both drives are WD models. I've already exchanged the drive once at Best
> > Buys so I have a hard time believing I got 2 bad devices in a row. Plus
> > they were able to see it at the store when mounted in their USB harness.
> >
> > Is it possible that the drive is just too big for the BIOS to handle?
> > Even if so, I would think that at least it could detect its presense.
> >
> > Any ideas what's going on?
> >
> > Thanks for your time.

-- 
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is today.
 -- Unknown